I took part in the Global game jam a few weeks ago and this was my teams entry. It was created in Unity 3D. My roll were a little bit of everything besides programming , but I was was the industry vet of the team and took up as the "Producer" type. I was surprised at the talent that are in Richmond, VA. Most of the Jammers were VCU alumni or students, and guess what they know what they are doing. My team consisted a Community collage instructor, a museum artist, and Indie dev who is close to finishing his own game AnotherCastleTheGame.com. We sadly had two others but they dropped out after the second day. Game Jams is a different beast and I was glad I was ready for it.

The game concept came from the topic for that game jam “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are”. The team came up with an idea to jump between different perspectives to accomplish a goal. That goal to escape a zoo, with that in mind our team prototyped a quick perspective shift ability in Unity that originally was to be used with the Oculus Rift (this was cut since we wanted other functionality and were running out of time).

The First day we accomplished the perspective swap tech and started to nail down animals we were going to use and motor controls so the size of the animals would be varied based on size.

The Second day we figured out the game systems we wanted to use and found that the game was about escaping a zoo by using the strengths of certain animals. this included the flow chart of what animal would be used to full fill the objective.

Last day was putting all the art and gameplay together. This Game jam was my first and it was not crazy and was rather easy. Unity and the team that was created worked so well.

The payoff was the presentation night, we had a great cheer for our endgame solution that was a bug that the elephant would shoot up in the air. We got a great crowd ovation for that. Such a wonderful night.